At dawn on February 8, I climbed into C/D’s long-term BMW X1 and set out for Carmel, California, where I was to drive the new Subaru WRX STI. When I headed out, we had 36 inches of snow on the ground, and the stuff was still pelting down “like twelve mad bastards,” as Hunter S. Thompson would say. After four hours of blindly aiming the BMW through shadowless ruts—many of which felt like driving over concrete curbs and dead cows—I’d covered 90 miles. Given the proper chemicals, Lance Armstrong could have done better. The BMW’s rear wiper clogged and stalled, then the relentless snow ­glacialized the grille. Bingo: an overheated engine in an ambient temp of 12 degrees F. I used a ballpoint pen and a 99-cent plastic scraper to gouge out maybe five pounds of crystalized crud. It had the consistency of aged white gum from the underside of a school desk.

It wasn’t until the 150-mile mark that I saw my first sliver of black roadway—this after passing three moose who viewed the highway as if it were Paradise Beach. I let out a ­celebratory whoop, and that’s when the snow turned to rain, falling at the same velocity and pressure you’d pay $500 to have in your bathroom shower.

West of Wells, Nevada, there was a temporary sign that said: “Standing Water on Road, Next 200 miles.” Has there ever been standing water for 200 miles? I think there are some Great Lakes that don’t stand for 200 miles. And this was, you know, Nevada, a place I’d been told was home to superheated rocks and sand and prostitutes but not water.

Phillips always wanted to become a big, strapping man.

On Day Two, on the Donner Pass, I passed overhead signs imploring: “Serious Drought, Help Save Water!” A cynical fellow might have smirked, given the heavenly tidal bore of liquid right then nearly obscuring the message. California, in fact, claims a 14-year drought, which must be true, because a whole generation of the state’s so-called drivers has no experience with any slick conditions beyond runaway lawn sprinklers. Near the top of the pass, a black Ram pickup shot past and disappeared in a wall of mist. Minutes later, I spied the lid of an Igloo cooler, a piece of tarp, then a paper bag, all three of which I ran over. I crested a blind rise and there, pancaked against the guardrail—venting steam like a Bronx manhole cover—was the Ram, minus its right-front corner and sporting a Darlington stripe that would have scared the boiled peanuts out of Cale Yarborough. I drove near enough to splash slush on the truck and hoped its driver had suffered a trifling but painful injury that would ­forever remind him of the perils of precipitation. But the cosmos rarely metes out ­justice on the spot.

Then, in Sacramento, the Californians outdid themselves in a kind of thousand-car Joie Chitwood stunt-driving pageant, in which speeds were increased to traverse puddles that had recently qualified as ponds. Which is when—with all of us furiously tailgating—a California Highway Patrol officer in a strobe-pulsing Charger shot out ahead and began weaving back and forth in front of all three lanes, as if herding wet cattle. The cop halted every 100 feet or so to retrieve a mound of ve­hicu­lar debris. And so, in this 5-mph processional, all of us eventually arrived upon a stretch of Interstate 5 that resembled downtown Kiev after the bars let out. In the three southbound lanes, there were maybe six cars in varying stages of unintentional recycling—backward, on their sides, nosed into each other—and maybe seven in the northbound lanes, including a National Guard 18-wheeler that had jackknifed into a desert-camo Slinky. The water was deep enough that I couldn’t see all the shrapnel, so, as before, I ran over it, later finding a shard of fan shroud in the BMW’s icy wheel well.

By the time I got to Monterey—marking 1250 consecutive miles of the BMW’s ­wipers operating at top speed—the density of traffic quadrupled, thanks to the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. “It’s running late because wind and rain caused the golfers’ balls to fly backward and blind PGA officials,” said that night’s amusing bartender.

2015 Subaru WRX STI

I test-drove the WRX STI, then nervously headed home, a journey that put the finishing touches on my new duodenal ulcer. I don’t want to talk about it, except to recollect a 100-mile stretch of near-whiteout conditions along the Salmon River Scenic Byway (U.S. Route 93 in Idaho), where I began hallucinating all-white objects—Tom Wolfe, the Donner Party’s cook, the ice-cream truck I drove when I was 17. Along that strip, by the way, don’t expect anyone to sell you fuel.

Nearing home, I started having trouble closing one eye, and that’s when the BMW surrendered to a snowdrift 10 feet from my garage, as if the car had been relieved of its duties and had permission to die. Certainly, it must have been mortified to be the filthiest man-made object since Bigfoot crash-landed on the Sno-Cone stand. Digging out involved a Caterpillar grader with six sets of chains. Talk about fun.

So, between now and July 4th, you might think you see me driving through town, but you’d be wrong.